To really be effective public health, and to have any chance at quelling transmission, most people should be vaccinated, and really there should be a better campaign to get uptake much higher than to have as of October 25th, 2024, just 13.5% of U.S. adults up-to-date as of the 2024─25 COVID-19 vaccine, which came out in August 2024.
But there are very few covid vaccine mandates nowadays in the U.S., and yet there are these stories of people with grudges willing to join raids, make shit lists, and making outrageous fictional claims about the vaccines – from claiming they’re gonna be in lettuce or the food supply generally, that they’ll implant eggs, or actually claiming that they’re products of the antichrist. This hysteria about vaccines is really out of proportion, to say the least.
There are some jobs, for example in healthcare, that might require vaccinations, and actually always have. People in the military are required to get all kinds of vaccines and most are grateful because at any time they might be deployed somewhere that there’s stuff in circulation that isn’t at home. If this were anyone else complaining about work mandates, conservatives would say “you signed up for it” or “just find another job” and be told to quit whining. So it’s very difficult to understand this enthusiasm for gripes.
The minimizers and anti-vaxxers are enthusiastically aggressive which is peculiar since their Great Barrington Declaration, minus the protection of the vulnerable of course which we always knew was a lie, has been enacted pretty much everywhere anyway! It’s like the trucker convoy people protesting public health mitigations that had no longer existed for quite awhile.
So why do they have to persist in a culture war against health & safety? I wonder if it’s because it was never about the particulars, it’s just about being against public health in general and finding targets to blame to distract from real problems with real solutions that some people with a lot of money and power don’t like.
Because it’s like Anne Nelson said on the Bucks County Beacon podcast The Signal: “follow the money. Because the greatest beneficiaries of their operations are the plutocrats that don’t want to pay any taxes and they don’t want any public services to the rest of us that cost them taxes, such as public schools, public roads, public libraries, public health. So they want to hold on to as much money as they can.”